“We think back through our mothers if we are women.”
Virginia Woolf, A room of One’s own
“Thus each generation of women writers has found itself, in a sense, forced to rediscover the past anew, forging again and again consciousness of their sex.”
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own
“Women, ignorant of their own history, did not know what women before them had thought and taught. So, generation after generation, they struggled for insights others had already had before them resulting in the constant inventing of the wheel.”
“Every woman should study women’s history for at least a year, no matter what she does. Every woman changes when she realizes that she has a story. “
Gerda Lerner
This textbook is designed within the project of the framework “Open education for a better world”. The UNESCO Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) is an international mentorship pairing initiative which pairs Project Leaders with Project Mentors, scholars and practitioners in their fields from across the globe. This textbook can be used as a learning or teaching material in the courses related to the history of women’s writing. The aim of this textbook is threefold: to present the richness and importance of women’s writing, to show how digital tools can help us in researching and studying women writers, especially their reception, and to make the recipients aware that women have a history of their own which is an equally important contribution to the history of humankind as the history of men.
The textbook Literary Foremothers: Women Writers in Dialog with Tradition of Their Own focuses on the history of female authorship and in doing so, it also develops students’ digital competence. Different texts written by women writers (short stories, novels, poems, essays) which are touching upon the works of their literary ancestors or contemporaries will be presented and discussed in this textbook. It will be shown how this information can be stored and found in different databases and virtual research environments, especially in the VRE Women Writers in History.
Women’s literary history and Digital Humanities are closely related nowadays: digital libraries and data-bases allow us to rediscover important women authors, their written production as well as their reception. Consequently, we gain a better understanding of women’s roles, especially in the literary scene of earlier periods. We can achieve this goal in the field of literature through teaching and discussing the works of women writers, as such works very often touch upon the issue of women’s position in society.
The concepts that are discussed in the textbook will hopefully trigger thinking about different constructions of gender in and through literature. You will learn about the rich female literary tradition and, moreover, especially female students among you will be empowered in terms of your own agency in the field of literature as well as in everyday life. The case studies will be embedded in the wider historical context of the female literary authorship, providing you with the knowledge from the literary history and leading to the comprehension of literature as the literary system in which women writers have a special place.
The work with the textbook requires some prior knowledge in the field of literary criticism and literary history in order to meet all its objectives. However, even if you are not a student of literature you can read the texts about women writers, think about the topics and issues discussed and compare it with your own experiences.
The textbook consists of 8 chapters, 5 hours content engagement and solving tasks per chapter, adding 8 hours for further reading per each chapter. All links open in a new tab. The textbook is intended for the beginners course in women’s writing research. By reading texts by women writers you will be introduced to their world and their reactions to predecessors and contemporaries. Furthermore, you will be able to find information about women writers in the digital databases and use them for learning and research and, furthermore, understand the importance of the category of gender as a crucial factor that constitutes the social and symbolic order at various levels. With the help of theoretical insights of feminist theory and theories of gender studies, you will be able to discuss, to a certain degree (depending on your knowledge in the field of literary history), gender issues in literary texts, compare different texts, argue different aspects of the reception of female authors and learn the strategies used by women writers to fight the biased views on the female and male literary creativity. You will acknowledge the importance of digital tools: you will be able to find information about women writers in the databases and use this information for your own study and research. Moreover, you will develop the sensibility for the importance of solidarity among women and be able to develop your own views on the importance of female literary tradition. Last but not least, if you are open for the messages that women writers communicated through their texts and you enter into the dialogue with them, it is pretty certain that you will change in the way that Gerda Lerner describes when she envisions the final result of studying women’s history.
The textbook is dedicated to authors from three different literary traditions: Anglo-American, French, and German. Their works were originally written in English, or translated into English a long time ago, so the translations are not bound by any copyrights, so I was able to use them in this textbook with the licence CC BY- NC – SA. I would very much appreciate translations of this texbook into other languages, and moreover, it would be great if the textbook expanded to other linguistic environments, and would thus get chapters on female writers from other literary milieus. This is something that I did in the last, eighth chapter, where I talk about the reception of a German-Baltic writer Laura Marholm by Slovene writer Zofka Kveder.
